This article provides some excellent background on organized labor, its alienation from activist youth, and some excellent suggestions on how to bridge the gap by using more effective militant tactics in future confrontations with highly organized capital.
"Smashing shit up," then, is both an expression of this context and a direct reflection of the low level of struggle and resistance in labour unions and on the left.
...These tactics keep reappearing precisely because they represent a wholesale departure from the forms of passive politics and bureaucratically controlled resistance that have increasingly monopolized the political terrain of working-class struggle in the last half-century in both Canada and the US.